The many faces of the holocaust
This week we remembered those murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The world turned its face once more to the Shoa, rightly remembering the mechanised genocide of over six million Jewish people from all across Europe. It is impossible to quantify this loss of life, all the potential destroyed for no reason other than to satisfy dark political wills. Alongside these remembrances in smaller pockets members of the queer, disabled, gypsy, and socialist communities remembered those lost all because they were deemed untermenchen. It is hard to write anything meaningful that has not already been said, but I feel it is a vital part of myself that I do so, if only to keep reminding people that the Holocaust did not start in 1941, or end in 1945. Nor was it a slow pebble that rolled down a mountainside into a cataclysmic avalanche; no, its roots were planted and watered from the very moment the Nazis took control of the Germany state.
Hannah Arendt described a banality of evil, a state within which the human agents of the state just do, just act, just behave as if what they are perpetrating is rational and just in the eyes of the law. Sending socialist men and women to concentration camps, deemed enemies of the state, where work would supposedly set them free, was the first step. Justified in quashing a potential communist insurrection that would turn Germany red. Thus, the first evils were acts of loyalty and oppression which few German citizens were concerned and even celebrated.
Slowly, testingly, the Nazis co-opted citizens through the radio, the Kino, the classroom, the bund. Each drip, each step was calculated, yet also haphazard. There was no master plan. There was no inflection point, beyond the 1933 election, where you can directly point and say “aha!” No, there was this seeping poison that crept through society, stripping rights from undesirables, murdering disabled children and adults, decrying the Slav, the homosexual, the gypsy, the socialist, indeed anyone who did not fit a certain mould. And the German volk knew this was happening, at least the tacit understanding was there.
Why does this matter? Why claim that the holocaust did not finish in 1945? Because for a sub-section of those condemned by the Nazis were also condemned by the reformed German republics in the post-war years, namely homosexual men. Their imprisonment lasted up to 15 years beyond the capitulation of Hitler’s band of murderers. The laws confining them were carried over into the new West Germany, a cultural legacy that stopped conversation and healing. Indeed, while the Shoa is rightfully commemorated by a statement memorial in Berlin, the homosexual memorial is a pillbox on the opposite side of the road barely big enough for a view screen. This is a banality of society, the wilful ignorance due to abject prejudice.
What began as an exorcism of socialists ended with the prolonged imprisonment and exclusion of gay men. German society, or at least the conservative elements who bankrolled the Nazis and helped establish order after the war, viewed any non-heteronormative sexuality as aberrant, worthy of distain and destruction. Their heavy-set world view cast the banality of evil, functionaries of oppression, far into the twentieth century beyond the ken of the original Nazis rule. This banality was only overcome because many queer voices demanded liberation. And they barely managed to get it.
One of the most profound realisations of the banality of evil is not that evil exists, but that evil is workaday, boring, mundane. It is not only the big flourish or the barbaric gesture, but the functional mechanism through which oppression operates. First they came for the socialists because they feared a communist takeover. Then they came for the abandoned disabled children. The rest is painful history. Any society is capable of such acts, that banal wilful ignorance or tacit acceptance. Germany in 1933 was democratic. Germany in 1934 was not.
This is why we remember the Shoa, remember the queer victims of the holocaust, along with all the other victims of the Nazis regime. Because to forget is to invite our own banality of evil, to see others as untermenchen, and perpetuate cycles of violence that strip our fellow humans of their dignity and lives. The holocaust and Shoa may be slipping into historic memory, but it is up to us to carry the torch and always be watchful for those banal acts that drag us backwards one step at a time.
